Isidor Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 –
June 18, 1989; born Isidor Feinstein, better known
as I. F. Stone and Izzy Stone)
was an iconoclasticAmericaninvestigative journalist.[1][2]
He is best remembered for his self-published newsletter, I. F.
Stone's Weekly which was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow
journalists of "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United
States in the 20th Century".[3]

Stone attended Haddonfield Memorial High
School, where he ultimately graduated ranked 49th in his class
of 52.[5] He
started his own newspaper, the Progress, as a high school
sophomore. He later worked for the Haddonfield Press and
the Camden Courier-Post. After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania,
he joined the The Philadelphia Inquirer, then known as the
"Republican Bible of Pennsylvania.": [2]
Influenced by the work of Jack London, he became a radical
journalist. He joined the Inquirer's morning rival, the
"Philadelphia Record", owned by liberal Democrat J. David Stern,
and he moved to the New York Post after Stern bought that paper in
the Depression. In the 1930s, he played an active role in the Popular Front opposition to Adolf Hitler.

Marriage

In 1929, he married Esther Roisman, who later served as his
assistant at I.F. Stone's Weekly.[2]
They remained married until his death and had three children: Celia
(m. Gilbert), Jeremy, and Christopher.

Career

New York
Post

Stone moved to the New York Post in 1933 and during
this period supported Franklin
Roosevelt and the New
Deal. His first book, The Court Disposes (1937), was a
critique of the Court's role in blocking New Deal reforms. On the
advice of an editor that his political writings would be better
received if he were not perceived as Jewish, he changed his name to
I. F. Stone in 1937. He would later recall he "still felt badly"
about the change, and referred to himself as "Izzy" throughout his
career.[6]

The
Nation

After leaving the New York Post in 1939, Stone became
associate editor and then Washington editor of The Nation.[2]
His next book, Business as Unusual (1941), was an attack
on the country's failure to prepare for war.

Stone's exposé of the FBI for the Nation during the war
caused a sensation and deeply embarrassed J. Edgar
Hoover, when Stone revealed the bigotry of the questions the
FBI asked to ferret out subversives from the civil service: "Does
he mix with Negroes? Does he...have too many Jewish friends? Does
he think the colored races are as good as the white? Why do you
suppose he has hired so many Jews?." And, hilariously given the
time, when Vichy France was a Nazi puppet regime, "Is he always
criticizing Vichy
France?" In Izzy's column he noted "questions like these are
being used as a sieve to strain anti-fascists and liberals out of
the government. They serve no other purpose."[7] Many
readers wrote in to thank the magazine for running the article, but
the Nation was criticized for allowing Stone to conceal
the identity of his sources. In 1946, the Nation's editor
Freda Kirchwey
fired Stone when she found out that he had signed with the
progressive New York afternoon newspaper,PM, as a foreign correspondent covering the
Jewish underground in Mandatory Palestine.

Work for
PM

After the end of Second World War Stone traveled to the
Near East to report on the efforts of displaced Eastern EuropeanJews to enter
Palestine. In the resulting book Underground to Palestine
(1948), Stone wrote that the displaced persons made strenuous
efforts to reach the Jewish homeland of Israel although it would
have been far easier to emigrate to the United States because,

They have been kicked around as Jews and now they want to live
as Jews. Over and over I heard it said: "We want to build a Jewish
country. ... We are tired of putting our sweat and blood into
places where we are not welcome." ... These Jews want the right to
live as a people, to build as a people, to make their contribution
to the world as a people. Are their national aspirations any less
worthy of respect than those of any other oppressed people?[8]

Stone shared the Zionists' aspirations and strongly supported
the creation of the State of Israel before it was recognized by the
government of the United States. Like other moderate Zionists,
including the distinguished diplomat and later Israeli Minister Abba Eban, Stone also
supported a bi-national state in which Jews and
Palestinians could live together. As the years passed, however,
Stone became increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinians'
plight,[2]
attracting Eban's displeasure. Fellow "gadfly", Noam Chomsky claimed
in a 2009 interview that Eban had disparaged both himself and Stone
as "neurotic self-hating Jews".[9]

According to D.D. Guttenplan, Stone

stopped going to Israel in 1950, because the State Department
wouldn’t give him a passport. But as soon as he got his passport
back, in part because of a legal victory by his brother-in-law
Leonard Boudin . . . who kept the State Department from taking away
your passport for political reasons, [and] who established the
right to travel, Stone got his passport back and went to Israel
again in ’56, before the Suez War. And he wrote two things. He
wrote, “Israel is a transformed country. What was once a struggling
country is now a thriving country. Economically, it’s booming. It
will win—it’s prepared for war and will win, you know, the next
war, or the next war after that, militarily.” He said, “But there
will be wars and wars and wars until Israel comes to terms with the
Palestinians.” He wrote in 1956, “The road to peace lies through
the Palestinian refugee camp.”[10]

PM
went under in 1948 and was replaced first by the New York
Star and then the Daily Compass until it ceased
publication in 1952. A critic of the emerging Cold War, Stone published the Hidden
History of the Korean War that same year.[2]
The book suggested that South Korea initiated hostilities with
unprovoked cross-border attacks and was highly critical of U.S.
policies under John Foster Dulles, General Douglas
MacArthur, and Korean dictator Syngman Rhee. Stone wrote:

I believe I have succeeded in throwing new light on its origins,
on the operations of MacArthur and Dulles, on the weaknesses of
Truman and Acheson, on the way the Chinese were provoked to
intervene, and on the way the truce talks have been dragged out and
the issues muddied by American military men hostile from the first
to negotiations. I have tried to bring as much of the hidden story
to light as I could in order to put the people of the United States
and the United Nations on guard.

I. F.
Stone's Weekly

In the 1930s and 40s Stone had been a mainstream journalist,
appearing on Meet the Press (then a radio show);
in 1950 he found himself blacklisted and unable to get work.[11] In
1953, inspired by the example of the muckraking journalist George Seldes and
his political weekly, In Fact, Stone decided to start his
own independent newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly. Over the
next few years, Stone's newsletter campaigned against McCarthyism and racial discrimination in the
United States.

In 1964, using evidence drawn from a close reading and analysis
of published accounts, Stone was the only American journalist to
challenge President Johnson's
account of the Gulf of Tonkin
incident. During the 1960s, Stone continued to criticize
the Vietnam War. At its peak in the 1960s, the Weekly
had a circulation of about 70,000,[12] yet
it was regarded as very influential.

Hundreds of articles originally published in the Weekly
were later republished in The I.F. Stone's Weekly Reader
(1973), and in three volumes of a six-volume compendium of Stone's
writings called A Noncomformist History of Our Times
(1989).

Journalistic
style

According to Nation Magazine editor Victor Navasky, Stone's journalistic work
drew heavily on obscure documents from the public domain; some of
his best scoops were discovered by peering through the voluminous
official records generated by the government. Navasky also believes
that as an outspoken leftist journalist working in often hostile
environments, Stone's stories needed to meet an extremely high
burden of proof to be considered credible. Navasky argues that most
of Stone's articles are very well sourced, typically with official
documents. Navasky described Stone's willingness to "scour and
devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record,
study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and
reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would
appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the
official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity,
documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties."[13]

For himself, Stone had this to say about his style of
reporting:

"I made no claims to inside stuff. I tried to give information
which could be documented, so the reader could check it for
himself... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they
cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the
military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the
pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him... But a reporter
covering the whole capital on his own — particularly if he is his
own employer — is immune from these pressures."

Retirement,
Classical scholarship and death

In 1971 angina pectoris forced Stone to cease
publication of the Weekly. After his retirement, he
decided to return to the University of Pennsylvania, whence he had
dropped out years before and earn his degree in Classical
Languages. Stone successfully learned ancient Greek and wrote a book about the
prosecution and death of Socrates, The Trial of
Socrates, in which he argued that Socrates wanted to be
sentenced to death in order to shame the Athenian democracy, which
he despised.

In 2008 The Park Center for Independent Media at the Roy H. Park School of
Communications created the Izzy Award, named after Stone. The
award goes to "an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for
contributions to our culture, politics, or journalism created
outside traditional corporate structures" for "special achievement
in independent media." [16]

The Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award of the
Association for Education In Journalism & Mass
Communications

The ACLU Award

Allegations of being a
Soviet agent

1992 allegations and their
rebuttal

In March 1992, Guardian journalist Andrew
Brown quoted a Soviet Embassy attaché, KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, as
saying, "We had an agent — a well-known American journalist — with
a good reputation, who severed his ties with us after 1956. I
myself convinced him to resume them. But in 1968, after the invasion of
Czechoslovakia … he said he would never again take any money
from us."[17] In
June 1992, Herbert Romerstein, a former investigator for the House
Committee on UnAmerican Activities,[18] and
Eric Breindel,
editorial writer for the N.Y. Post, claimed that the unnamed agent
was I.F. Stone.

Brown subsequently conceded that when he had "used the phrase
'an agent' to describe someone who turned out to be I.F. Stone",
that he understood the term, “agent” to mean “useful contact,” and
that the “take any money” reference simply meant that Stone would
not permit a Soviet employee to pick up the check for lunch then,
or in the future, as had sometimes been done before. He adds that
New York trial lawyer and author Martin Garbus recounted that in September
1992, while at the Moscow Journalists Club, Kalugin had explained
to him, "I have no proof that Stone was an agent. I have no proof
that Stone ever received any money from the KGB or the Russian
government, I never gave Stone any money and was never involved
with him as an agent."[19]

Kalugin's testimony also contradicted Romerstein's allegation
that Stone was a Soviet "agent" in interviews he gave I.F. Stone's
two most recent biographers, historian D.D. Guttenplan (author of
Holocaust on Trial) and former Washington Post writer Myra
MacPherson (author of the Vietnam War classic, Long Time
Passing). Guttenplan reported Kalugin’s denials in articles in
the Nation and the New York Post. To Myra
MacPherson Kalugin said: “We had no clandestine relationship. We
had no secret arrangement. I was the press officer... I never paid
him anything. I sometimes bought lunch.”[20]

MacPherson notes, however, that American journalist Max Holland persisted
in repeating allegations about Stone accepting money from the
Soviet Union, even while acknowledging the unreliability of their
source (i.e., Oleg Kalugin):

As for the conflicting tales woven by former KGB agent Kalugin
about his relationship with Stone from 1966 to 1968, Holland
correctly notes that "Kalugin seemed incapable of telling the same
story more than once." Still, this did not keep Holland from
repeating the damaging and long refuted lie that Herbert
Romerstein, former HUAC sleuth, developed after talking with
Kalugin, that Moscow Gold subsidized Stone's weekly newspaper. No
where is there any evidence that Stone took money for anything
except a possible lunch or two. Nor is there any evidence, as
Holland points out, that Kalugin was able to plant stories with
Stone.[21]

In his own memoir about his years as an undercover KGB man
working as a Soviet press attaché in Washington, Oleg Kalugin
revealed that he routinely met with many journalists in addition to
Stone, including Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft, Drew Pearson, Chalmers Robers
and Murray Marder of the Washington
Post, and others.[22]

According to Kalugin, Stone followed a practice of having lunch
with a Soviet press attaché from time to time, but broke off this
luncheon relationship after his first visit to the Soviet Union in
1956 and after hearing Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret
Speech" denouncing Stalin and the tyranny of his regime. When
Stone returned home from this trip to Russia he wrote in his
newsletter: "Whatever the consequences, I have to say what I really
feel after seeing the Soviet Union and carefully studying the
statements of its leading officials. This is not a good society
and it is not led by honest men." (italics in original)
Stone's comment that "nothing has happened in Russia to justify
cooperation abroad between the independent left and the Communists"
cost him several hundred subscribers to the Weekly.[23]

Kalugin stated that later he persuaded Stone to lunch with him
until after the 1968 Czechoslovakian uprising and subsequent
quelling of the revolt when Stone angrily refused to let Kalugin
pay for the lunch and stopped lunching with him.

Cassandra Tate of the Columbia Journalism
Review wrote that the alleged evidence of Stone’s
involvement with the KGB is based on a few lines at the end of a
KGB officer's speech. She concluded that he was not an "agent" and
that there is no evidence he collaborated with KGB.[24]

In a 1992 article in The Nation, Guttenplan argued that the
evidence shows clearly that Stone was never a witting collaborator
with Soviet intelligence, while leaving open the question of
exactly what the Soviets may have meant by the term "agent of
influence."[25] (See
also, the further Sections below.)

VENONA Project decrypts: Agent "BLIN": a question of
identity

In July 1995 the National Security Agency
released to the public documents relating to the VENONA Project a US Signals Intelligence
effort to collect and decrypt the text of Soviet KGB and GRU
telegraph messages from the 1940s. According to the VENONA files,
on September 13, 1944, the KGB New York station sent a message to
Moscow that Vladimir Pravdin, a NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB) officer working
under cover as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS, had been
trying to contact a person by codename "BLIN" (the Russian word for
pancake) in Washington, but that "BLIN" had been refusing to meet,
citing a busy schedule. He reported that Samuel Krafsur, an
American NKVD agent code-named
"IDE" who worked for TASS in the building that housed Stone’s
office, had tried to "sound him out but BLIN did not react." [26]

VENONA transcript 1506, dated October 23, 1944, indicated that
Pravdin had by now successfully met with "BLIN". The cable claimed
that "BLIN" was "not refusing his aid" but "had three children and
did not want to attract the attention of the FBI." "BLIN"'s fear
"was his unwillingness to spoil his career," since he "earned
$1500.00 per month but...[Pravdin speculated] would not be averse
to having a supplemental income."[27]

Walter and Miriam Schneir, in a 1999 Nation article
about the Venona materials, "Cables Coming in From the Cold,"
remarked on the difficulties of interpretation caused by their hearsay nature; the many steps
between a conversation and the sending of a cable; language
difficulties; the possibility of imperfect decryption, and
concluded "the Venona messages are not like the old TV show You Are There,
in which history was re-enacted before our eyes. They are history
seen through a glass, darkly."[28]

However, in the August 2000 book Venona: Decoding Soviet
Espionage in America, Cold War historians John Earl
Haynes and Harvey
Klehr claim with certainty that BLIN was Stone.[29][30]

Then in late 2000, Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel
published a book The Venona Secrets and repeated the
allegation that BLIN was Stone. As evidence they cited a remark
that Stone had made in his column of November 11, 1951 in response
to reports in the NY Herald Tribune about his leftist
sympathies, that he would not be surprised if he read in the
Herald Tribune "that I was smuggled in from Pinsk in a carton of blintzes". Romerstein and Breindel suggest
that Stone's use of the word "blintzes" betrayed a knowledge of his
alleged codename, "BLIN.".[31]
According to Stone's biographer, Myra MacPherson, however, the FBI
never identified Blin/Pancake as I.F. Stone. Instead they suspected
Ernest K. Lindley, who also had three children.[32]
The FBI contended that Blin must have been someone “whose true
pro-Soviet sympathies were not known to the public...” and hence
could not have been Stone,[32]
who, on the contrary, far from being "fearful," did not hide his
beliefs. Indeed, rather than wishing to avoid FBI attention as BLIN
reportedly did, I.F. Stone made a point of suggesting to the Soviet
press attache Oleg Kalugin that they lunch together at Harvey’s, a
favorite Hoover haunt, in order to "tweak his [the F.B.I.
Director's] nose.”.[32]

2009 Klehr,
Haynes,and Vassiliev book

In 2009, Klehr and Haynes together with Alexander
Vassiliev, a former Russian KBG agent turned journalist,
published Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America.
The book was partially financed by the Smith Richardson
Foundation, which also hosted a symposium to publicize it in
May 2009 at the Woodrow Wilson
Center in Washington, DC.[33] The
authors cite a KGB file (allegedly seen by Vassiliev while in
Russia) that explicitly named "Isidor Feinstein, a commentator for
the New York
Post" in the 1930s, as BLIN and indicating that in 1936
BLIN "entered the channel of normal operational work." Another note
supposedly listed BLIN as one of the New York KGB Station's agents
in late 1938. Klehr, Haynes, and Vassiliev claim that Stone
"assisted Soviet intelligence on a number of tasks, ranging from
doing some talent spotting, acting as a courier by relaying
information to other agents, and providing private journalist
tidbits and data the KGB found interesting." Specifically, they
state that "Pancake" was supposed to help recruit and support
anti-Nazi resistance activity in Berlin, Germany, at this time
(1936-38). The authors admit that Stone broke with the KGB after
the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939; and they
speculate that later Soviet contacts were in the nature of trying
to reactivate the previous relationship. They conclude: "The
documentary record shows that I.F. Stone consciously cooperated
with Soviet intelligence from 1936 through 1938 [the period of the
Popular Front]. An effort was made by
Soviet intelligence to reestablish that relationship in 1944-45; we
do not know whether that effort succeeded. To put it plainly, from
1936 to 1939 I.F. Stone was a Soviet spy",[34]

Jim Naureckas, writing for FAIR[35]
counters that Klehr, Haynes, and Vassiliev's allegations, if true,
indicate merely that Stone was “just gossiping,” and he assails the
authors for their “nefarious” and “tendentious” magnification of
“relatively innocuous behavior” on the basis of one anti-Nazi
maneuver. As for Stone being listed as an “agent”, Naureckas points
out that Walter Lippmann is listed as an agent as well.

Max Holland
argues that, while in his opinion there is no question I.F. Stone
was a "fully recruited and witting agent" from 1936 to 1938, Stone
"was not a 'spy' in that he did not engage in espionage and had no
access to classified material."[36]

Reviewing Spies in the Nation ( May 25, 2009),
Guttenplan opines “Spies never explains why we should
believe KGB officers, pushed to justify their existence (and
expense accounts) when they claim information comes from an
elaborately recruited ‘agent’ rather than merely a source or
contact.” He says the authors of Spies distort the report
from VENONA 1506 (October 1944) and never prove that BLIN was Stone
in 1936. He adds that their charges merely show that Stone “was a
good reporter” and notes that when Walter Lippmann is quoted in
Spies as having professional contacts with “a Soviet
journalist with whom he traded insights and information.” This is
the same man (Pravdin) whom Stone is said to have avoided.[37]

In a response to the allegations, the I.F. Stone website
responded:

There is not the slightest indication of espionage or access to
classified information in the scraps of KGB file information cited,
so this exaggeration has been deplored by sophisticated observers.
Indeed, in the one anecdote described, an anti-fascist maneuver in
Berlin, it is not clear whether the Russians were acting on Stone’s
suggestion (i.e., as his agent) or whether he was helping them in
his consistent, well-known, anti-fascist inclinations in the
thirties.[38]

In addition, it is often assumed, without evidence, that Stone
was pro-Soviet Union and pro-Stalin during the 1930s or beyond when
in fact Stone's writings were fairly critical of the Soviet Union
and Stalin during that time.[39][40] Stone
was a public journalist who aired his views in public.

^Muckraker, The Philadelphia
Inquirer, June 20, 1989. Accessed October 28, 2007. "Born
in Philadelphia and raised in Haddonfield, N.J., Mr. Stone worked
many years on newspapers in South Jersey, Philadelphia (including a
brief period for The Inquirer) and New York..."

^Voniati, Christiana (February 16, 2009).
"Chomsky on Gaza".
Countercurrents. http://www.countercurrents.org/voniati160209.htm. Retrieved
2009-05-27. Actually, in
1974, Chomsky had quoted Eban as writing "I do not believe that any
argument [...] can probably change the convictions of Noam Chomsky
or of I.F. Stone, whose basic complex is one of guilt about Jewish
survival". Chomsky, Noam (2004).
Middle East Illusions: Including Peace in the Middle East?
Reflections on Justice and Nationhood. Rowman &
Littlefield. pp. 130–131. ISBN
9780742529779.

^
Transcript from interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy
Now, June 19, 2009[1]

^
According to Guttenplan "They liked him on Meet the Press, the
original producer of Meet the Press told me, because he was a good
needler. He was very good at getting under the skin of sort of
pompous guests." One of the people he needled was Dr. Morris
Fishbein, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical
Association, who accused those supporting national health insurance
of being Communists. Stone asked, “Dr. Fishbein, given that
President Truman has already spoken out in favor of national health
insurance, do you think that that makes him a dangerous communist
or just a deluded fellow traveler?” (See transcript of D.D.
Guttenplan interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.[2]).

^
D.D. Guttenplan hss this to say about the files: "VENONA messages
are real, albeit problematic: the National Security Agency long
resisted releasing the Russian texts, and the English versions in
the public domain include a great deal of tendentious annotation,
much of it apparently the work of Robert Lamphere, the FBI's
liaison to the project. They are also ambiguous--not least about
the apparently simple matter of Blin's identity," ("Red Harvest,"
The Nation, May 6, 2009)

^
John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, with
translations by Philip Redko and Steven Shabad, Spies: The Rise
and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009), ISBN 978-0-300-123990-6, pp. 146-53. Besides the
ackowledgement to the Smith Richardson Foundation the authors also
thank Max Holland and Ron Radosh (among others) for their
assistance in writing the book.

From Wikiquote

Isador Feinstein Stone (better
known as I.F. Stone) (1907-12-24 – 1989-06-18) was an iconoclastic American
investigative journalist best known for his influential political
newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly.

Sourced

There must be renewed recognition that societies are kept
stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police; this means
there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea
subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is
to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.

I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context had
called "the significant trifle" — the bit of dialogue, the
overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the
realities of the situation.

The Haunted Fifties (1963)

The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the
absence of dissent. it is the absence of news. With a dozen or so
honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little
news. Their main concern is advertising.

All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries
whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.

In a Time of Torment, 1961-1967 (1967), p. 317

Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to
defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the
very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a
dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line.